A long-time coming Pooh-Bah post on HU play, Part I

[Str8Fish]

So here’s a timely couple of post on HU that I wrote up for you all. I don’t claim at all to be an expert at HU play… I have, however, given HU a lot of thought and practice and hopefully this post can spark some good discussion and thought about many aspects of HU games. There are obviously a billion things to talk about, so I’ll try to limit myself as much as possible. I am excluding a lot of discussion just for brevity and I expect the discussions to fill in the gaps. I have also broken up the discussion to include preflop, and then postflop concepts in two separate posts.

The first thing that I’d like to discuss briefly is the most important aspect of HU play… your opponent. Adjusting to your opponent’s game is crucial. You cannot go into a game and play one way all the time and never consider the way your opponent is playing against you. Please keep this in mind while we delve deeper into the world of HU play.


Preflop:

Choosing your hand range preflop is not as critical as full ring or 6-max. There are many players who do very well by playing 100% of their hands and there are many who play well under tighter conditions, where ‘tighter’ in this context means a tighter range than your opponent. However, there are disadvantages to both extremes: Too loose of a range can lead into more marginal/poor situations in later streets. Too tight of a range can lead to your opponent stealing your blinds and you folding the best hand too often. One advantage of playing more hands is in deception. By playing nearly all of your hands, your opponent has no chance to try to put you on a range and you’ve completely eliminated a street for your opponent to try. The advantage to playing tighter is that you have a higher probability of having the better hand preflop than your opponent.

Where should your range be preflop? I think that it is highly dependent on your opponent. For those opponents that are good at extracting value out of marginal situations in later streets, it might be better for you to try to play tighter. Maybe it’s you who are well off extracting bets… I would recommend you play looser. Please remember, though, that the two cards dealt to you are important and concepts like high card value, suitedness, etc. still matter. I’m not going to step you through the importance of these concepts. Go read a book if you want more info.

Why in HU, first in, would we raise? One obvious answer is that we have the chance to steal the blind. This is a no-brainer concept needing no real discussion. Second answer is for value. Paired hole cards, high card value, suitedness, etc. have a certain amount of equity versus a random hand. We are out to extract bets from our opponent when he/she has the worst of it. A third answer is to attempt to take control of the hand. Everyone on these boards knows that controlled aggression pays off in this game.

I also think that limping, or even limp/reraising may also have its advantages in HU play for deception purposes. But limping/LRR has to include not only marginal holdings, but powerhouses as well. A nice frequency of the two can throw your opponent off and make it difficult to know if you’re going to 3-bet him if he chooses to raise you. Basically, you’re out to make your opponent feel uneasy about raising your limping hands. It’s a style of HU play that you might want to consider against weaker opponents, though. I think any 2+2er would raise you no matter what, so it may not be effective against the TAG style and you might have to pay up with worse cards. On the other hand, a TAG style is actually thinking about what you might hold, so maybe it can work… I dunno, I don’t do this style frequently enough.

Second in, do you 3-bet or just call a raise? Some people I’ve reviewed 3-bet when they have a full ring 3-betting hand. I think this is a mistake as it gives your range away. In full ring, we 3-bet with a very narrow band of hands (in general, TT+, AQ+, AJs+ in LP – top 5% of hands). In 6-max, our range expands to 77+, A9s+, AJo+, KJs+, KQo in LP (top 9% of hands). Therefore, I think the 3-betting range should be larger than this for HU play. Just to throw this range out there for discussion only, maybe 55+, A5s+, A8o+, K8s+, KTo+? That’s a total of the top 17% of the hands. I think showing down a 3-bet hand like J9s once or twice could lead your opponent to think that you’re 3-betting a much larger range than what is shown here as well.

Please note, I only throw this range out there as a general guideline toward what could be 3-bet against a HU opponent. This obviously doesn’t take into account your opponent’s tendencies, which it really should. Let’s say you’re playing an opponent who assumes the worst when 3-bet and will easily give it up on the flop if he/she doesn’t hit it hard… your 3-betting range should be larger. You don’t want to make it too large though, cause then your opponent will stop believing you have the goods. There’s a thin line to cross here and it’s totally read-dependent on your opponent how far you can take your range before you lose your opponents opinion of your play.

A habitual bluffer will cap with a very broad range, much broader than the top 17% of the hands. Against this opponent, there’s a lot of equity to your 3-bet and calling the cap. Your opponents range is larger than yours, so you have the best of it if you were to stick to the top 17%. I’ve tried and I like the concept of just calling his raises, no matter what the cards I hold. I feel like it adds a lot of deception and also almost forces your opponent to continuation-bet the flop against all of your cards, leading to your c/r on the flop, turn or river. 3-betting forces you to take the lead and almost always c-bet the flop. Against a bluffer, when you miss, you might find yourself c/r, of which you will need to decide to continue or not. Playing a habitual bluffer is a high variance game and there are multiple ways to play them. I might take a more conservative line than others here. I know many of you who turn up the notch and become a habitual bluffer back. I think at that point, the whole game becomes a coin-flip as the variance is completely skewed. (I’m thinking about the Kwaz versus Aaron match here).

Against any opponent, remember that changing up your style becomes important so that you don’t fall into a predictable pattern. This concept applies to all streets, even preflop. Your mission (if you choose to accept it) is to make your opponent not know when you have the best of it and to extract as much value out of him/her without them knowing.

Discuss please. Also, no tl;dr please. I'm not summarizing this thing. Part 2 should be out near the end of the week.

[Rev. Good Will]

I think you figured out all of HEFAP's SH sectoin without reading it [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]

good post

[bennyhana]

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I think you figured out all of HEFAP's SH sectoin without reading it [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]

good post

[/ QUOTE ]

yes, good post, but you still should read hefap sh section.

i hope part 2 contains information on pot odds preflop and the value of defending your blinds.

[Str8Fish]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I think you figured out all of HEFAP's SH sectoin without reading it [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]

good post

[/ QUOTE ]

yes, good post, but you still should read hefap sh section.

i hope part 2 contains information on pot odds preflop and the value of defending your blinds.

[/ QUOTE ]

Isn't all of HU a blind defense situation? I don't necessarily come out and say it like that, but that's basically what it is each and every time.

Also, I have read the HEPFAP's s/h section. I don't know why you guys assume I haven't. There's other discussion in that book than what I've discussed here as well, so others who are interested in learning more might use that as a reference.

[HouseCalls]

tl;dr [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

Nice post. I'm still digesting this but one thing immediately caught my eye:

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I also think that limping, or even limp/reraising may also have its advantages in HU play for deception purposes.

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Are there hands that "should" be limping hands or is any hand good enough to play good enough to raise?

If there are no hands that should be limped then we are limping at random. If so what % of hands should we limp and why??

[MrWookie]

Personally, I don't like using a mixed limp and LRR strategy preflop. It has some merit as far as play variation goes and getting in with more holdings, but I think it makes hands more difficult to play. It gives the big blind the option of raising now, or checking and coming out firing. The pot is so small that if the big blind bets the flop, continuing on with the worst hand is a fairly substantial error. His bluffing power is quite high against what is in all probability a weak holding. A game theory approach to this would be to bet any pair or better, and then bet 2/3 of the time without one. It's turned the blind steal around, putting the button on the defensive, only now there are bigger mistakes to be made.

Furthermore, it makes the hand reading for the big blind easier. When you limp, he knows you have either a very weak holding, or a very strong one. Some players mix it up more than this, but this is still a pretty reasonable assumption until you start limping more than you raise. With that in mind, the BB knows automatically not to put in many bets without a hand that can beat an overpair, but he's also very inclined to show down marginal made hands.

Where limping starts to become attractive is against a manaical BB who'll raise virtually every time. If he's raising everything, the button knows that his steal raises have no value, and he's not going to ever have the initiative. Instead, it's in his interest to control pot size to best magnify the mistakes of his opponent postflop. He can fold his worst holdings, knowing that his better hands are going to increase in value against this sort of player. He can limp and then call his mid range holdings to see the flop and hopefully punish the bluffing station in a small pot. And then he can LRR his best holdings, along with a few others depending on how much the bluffing station catches on, to best exploit his huge edge against his opponent's range. I've only seen one player play like this, though. Fuji, way back in the original CHUMP tournament, tried out this play kinda just for fun. He actually won his first match against Shillx by running good and Shill maybe not rebluffing as much as he should. And then he got destroyed in subsequent rounds.

[Str8Fish]

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Are there hands that "should" be limping hands or is any hand good enough to play good enough to raise?

If there are no hands that should be limped then we are limping at random. If so what % of hands should we limp and why??

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It's hard to answer your question directly with an exact percentage... here's a fun quote I found from here:

"Well, so much of heads up play is read dependant. A lot of it is about playing a hand of a certain strength a certain way until you show that strength of hand down a few times and your opponent has a "read"... then making sure to play that strength of hand differently from that point on, then switching again later, then back again, etc.

A guess this is a long winded way of saying to try and play this hand however your opponent thinks you wouldn't play it. Of course, I can't tell you what that would be. It's so important in heads up matchs to remember how you've played and also how your opponent has played. What kinds of hands does he lead the flop with? What kind of hands have you shown down after raising the flop? How does he respond to your raises? If you have called a lot up to this point with a wide range of hands, then call. Don't make your play look any different than the norm. If you have raised a lot of flops with air, 3rd pair, etc, then raise here. I'm sure you get the picture by now. But it's really impossible for anyone to tell you what the best line is without seeing all the hands leading up to it. Heads up SNGs are so much less robotic than 9 or 10 person ones. It's really only useful to look at individual hands in context of the rest of the tournament."

The gist being, try to remember what you've limped or LRR with and don't be consistent with it. If you limp AA the first time, fast play it the second time or third time. Dno't play a hand the same every time, which leads to patterns. Limp strong hands and weak hands. If you limp, make sure your opponent gets a glimpse of both sides of the story.

[MrWookie]

I think your wording "play this hand however your opponent thinks you wouldn't play it" is apt to get taken the wrong way. There is an awfully good reason to flop trips out of the BB, and then c/c the flop to c/r the turn. Why? One, it gets a lot of value, and two, your opponent doesn't believe you. The thing is, there are a lot of hands you can play that way. You'll likely have run some bluffs in that manner, played a PP that way, played paring the third card that way, or played a flush draw that way. There's a good reason why the "standard lines" are standard. They work well! Even HU against a thinking opponent. If your opponent thinks so much of you as to always put you on trips when you play that way, then he's desitined to piss away money.

Play variation is not about taking wonky lines all the time. It's a balance of playing different sets hands the same way, and occasionally playing them just a little differently. I think FPS is one of the biggest mistakes 2+2ers make when playing against each other. I'm guilty of this, too, but I've been working on it.

[kumarshah]

In two of my matches, I was suprised to see opponenets who would never complete from the SB. Infact, in one of the matches the person pretty much followed a raise or fold srategy from the SB. What do you guys say?

Also, what should your PF strategy against a Maniac HU?

[Smurph64]

The one thing I don't do in HU preflop is spend a lot of time thinking about what I am doing but rather thinking about what he is doing. I haven't had a lot of HU experience but it seems to me that I can lose preflop if I think about but I can't if I don't.

Never fold preflop until you can figure out the pattern of your opponent.

Generally whenever I am heads up against someone I play the first ten hands capped preflop to see what my opponent does.

If I can win preflop then I have a very weak opponent and I will just cap everything. It won't matter because essentially I have moved the preflop action to the flop and just raised the antes.

HU you have to be prepared to consider your starting two cards as blanks with no value at all and the only reason to alter your play is to set up a later street where you have the edge by position or hesitation on the part of your opponent.

You cannot allow your opponent to think preflop about you so if you don't think he loses that advantage.

After ten hands then I try and recall when he folded, did he fold on the button, did he fold to reraises only? Any folding on the HU part that is consisent is a weakness.

If after ten hands I cannot spot a pattern then it's time to change my play by randomizing. I randomize using a variety of techniques, but usually i play roulette, blackjack or beat the clock.

Roulette I decide to bet on red, check on black, bet on odd and check on even or vica versa. Blackjack I play by blackjack rules quite simply but just rotate the round of betting I apply the rules to. Beat the Clock I add up the cards and if the sweep hand is higher than the two I raise if its lower I call.

Or alterations of the above. The bottom line is I don't think about the cards in play until the flop OR until my opponent starts thinking about his cards in play preflop.

Generally, if your opponent starts to think preflop about their own cards before you think about yours, you have the edge.